Darius the Great Is Not Okay

After finishing his shift at Tea Haven and going outside, Darius discovers that Trent and Chip have removed the wheels and seat from his bicycle, replacing the latter with a pair of blue rubber testicles. Darius calls his father to ask for a ride home and, to his embarrassment, is forced to explain what happened. Before hanging up, his father reminds him to buy a goldfish for Nowruz, “breath[ing] a Level Five Disappointed Sigh” when he learns that Darius hasn’t already done so (11).

Darius’s father arrives half an hour later, admitting that he nearly didn’t believe his son’s story. He presses Darius for more details and, when Darius explains who he thinks was responsible for vandalizing the bike, tells his son he wouldn’t be bullied if he stood up for himself. He also says that Darius needs a haircut, prompting Darius to reflect on how different he looks from his blond-haired, blue-eyed father.

Later that evening, Darius sits down for dinner with his parents and his younger sister Laleh. Listening to Laleh talk about her day, Darius thinks about how boys aren’t “supposed” to acknowledge their love for their sisters: “We can’t admit to having tea parties or playing dolls with them, because that’s unmanly” (16). At one point, he tries to refill his plate with pasta, but his father insists that he have salad instead.

After dinner and the dishes are done, Darius brews a cup of tea and settles into his nightly routine of watching an episode of Star Trek with his father: “It felt good to have a thing with Dad, when I could have him to myself for forty-seven minutes, and he could act like he enjoyed my company for the span of one episode” (18). Part-way through the episode, they’re interrupted by Darius’s mother, who they can hear speaking in Farsi. Laleh appears a moment later and explains that their mother is talking to her brother Jamsheed and her parents on a video call. Laleh, Darius, and their father get up to say hello.

Darius greets his grandmother, whom he calls Mamou, and awkwardly responds to her questions about work and school: “It was like I had this well inside me, but every time I saw Mamou, it got blocked up” (24). His father asks about Darius’s grandfather (Babou), and Mamou says he visited the doctor earlier that day. As Mamou and Jamsheed begin to chat with Laleh in Farsi, Darius and his father excuse themselves.

Laleh is watching the goldfish Darius bought as they swim in their bowl on the Haft-Seen: an end table display set out for Nowruz (the Persian New Year). Noting that one of the goldfish only has one eye, Laleh tells Darius she’s going to name it Ahab, after the character from “Moby the Whale” (i.e., Moby-Dick). Later that night, as Darius is in the kitchen taking his antidepressants, his father comes in and asks him to get out his as well. His father is also living with depression, and Darius believes his father is secretly “ashamed” of both of them for relying on medication (28). Stephen then breaks the news that Babou, who has been fighting a brain tumor, isn’t going to recover; as a result, he and Darius’s mother have decided to visit Iran and bring Darius and Laleh with them.

A few weeks later, the Kellners have gotten their visas and are ready to go to Iran. Darius tells Javaneh Esfahani—a fellow Persian American and “the closest thing [Darius] [has] to a friend” at school (31)—that he’s leaving the next day, and she responds with excitement and jealousy, saying she wants to visit Iran. She asks if this means the family will miss Chaharshanbeh Suri: a celebration that involves jumping over a fire. Darius says they’ll probably fly over one but is privately happy to miss the festivities, which his father usually takes part in enthusiastically.

After finishing lunch, Darius goes to the nurse’s office to take his medicine. Unlike his father, who says he’s had his depression under control since college, Darius has struggled to find the right medication; Prozac, for instance, “gave [him] mood swings so extreme, they were more like Mood Slingshot Maneuvers, powerful enough to fling [him] around the sun and accelerate [him] into a time warp” (33). He was in the Boy Scouts at the time and hit a boy who was making fun of his mother’s accent.

While on his way to gym, Darius hears Chip calling his name. Darius ignores him, so Chip grabs Darius’s backpack, causing it to split open. As Darius gathers his things, brushing off Chip’s offers to help, Chip says he just meant to warn him that his backpack wasn’t zipped; he also says the bike incident was meant to be a joke, and that they’d left the tires nearby.

Darius arrives late to gym class, where (to his chagrin) they’re doing a unit on net sports: “I did better at the [sports] where I could at least run around, because I was not bad at running. I had a lot of stamina and I was pretty fast, which surprised people since I was kind of overweight” (37). As the students warm up, Chip again approaches Darius to apologize.

Darius ends up on Trent’s team for volleyball and struggles to keep up. When he tries to pass the ball, he accidentally knocks it into another boy’s head, and Trent calls him a terrorist. Darius finds this kind of bullying preferable to Trent’s other insults: “Mom always said those kinds of jokes didn’t bother her, because Persians couldn’t be terrorists. No Persian can get up early enough in the morning to bomb anything” (39).